Noor Badarudin

“Savannah was invariably gracious to strangers, but it was immune to their charms. It wanted nothing so much as to be left alone.” ~ page 385 I find the idea of the city as a character very endearing. And as I reached the end of the true crime story cum travelogue by John Berendt, it brought to mind of other small towns whose histories and scandals are yet to be written. Then again, how outsiders’ view a place, it’s inhabitants and their life stories might differ from that of a local’s. Or it might not since Berendt, a Yankee from New York City, ‘went native’ when he eventually stayed eight years in the most beautiful city in North America (la plus belle des villes ~ Le Monde). He was not just a detached observer and narrator but an active participant who was embroiled in the lives of the human characters in The Book. A controversial murder case which involved Jim Williams, the owner of a splendidly restored Mercer House, and his live-in part-time lover, Danny Handsford, served as the central incident which glued the other miscellaneous happenings together. The court trials (a landmark four for a murder case) brought the animosity between Inherited and Earned Wealth (represented by the Adlers et al and Williams) and politics in the court room (Lawton vs Sonny) to the fore. Of course, there was that bitter class conflict between Williams and Handsford and the pragmatic class alliance between him and the mystic healer Minerva. Other complex intersectional class-race-gender-geographical issues were that of Black Transgender (Chablis), the romance between Joe Odom and Mandy Nicols, the lingering mistrust for Yankees and so forth. Midnight to me as a former Cult Stud scholar is “a rollicking popular anthropology” (a term borrowed from a review by The Independent) which laid bare the psyche of the Deep South in the ‘80s.